NES Goes Under The Knife

Thanks to Nintendojo for their continuing Family Computer (NES) 20th anniversary special, which is still adding new game reviews and content, but now has 'under the knife' dissection pages for both the original Japanese Famicom and the classic American NES, showing the consoles disassembled and analyzed. The rest of the site has mini-reviews of some classic NES titles, and info on oddities like I Am A Teacher: Super Mario Sweater: "Japanese appliance and sewing machine maker Royal Industries Co., Ltd. saw an opportunity to cash in with the Nintendo Famicom Disk System. Selling pixel art sweater design software for a mere 2900 yen (about $24), the company could make a fortune taking orders for custom sweaters! It sounds crazy, but it must've seemed like a good idea at the time."

Comments

expansion slot

[slothman32]

I was hoping they'd tell us what the slot did. I haven't seen anything that could use it.

Y0SHi

[dimator]

Anyone remember the original NES Doc by Jeremy Chadwick (Y0SHi)? This dude layed the groundwork for most of the NES emulation scene with his detailed account of NES internals... link

I think he dropped out of the emu scene on bad terms... not sure.

Anyone tried to portable-ise a NES yet?

[Flying-Cow-Man]

Every time I pull apart an old system (which I do fairly regularly), I'm amazed at how, by today's standards, simple these things are. I know www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/ is run buy a guy with a penchant for doing incredible things with portable Atari 2600's (he did a PS1 as well), but what about more mainstream systems? Surely it would be fairly cheap to wrap a GBA case around a SNES, and you've got an instant 1000's of games to choose from. Hell, I was pretty tempted to have a go at an N64 not too long ago.

Assuming we had schematics, circuit layouts, etc and didn't have to pull apart old systems for parts, it would be trivial to fit all the silicon you would need in one chip. Then its a matter of minimalising the analogue components, which is basically all your I/O (screen / AV out, controls). If I had the full schematics and access to a fab I could do it myself....

Some big company with lots of money should license this idea from me. I want my Mario All-Stars on a handheld!

Re:Anyone tried to portable-ise a NES yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope ROMs aren't illegal or a lot of old BIOS makers are in trouble. Seriously, though, the question isn't whether ROMs are legal or illegal any more than it's a question of whether or not mp3s are illegal or not. ROMs and mp3s are just a medium. Whether you have redistribution rights (the right to copy and then distribute again) is an issue for which copyright infringement might be occuring.

As for SNES games, you wouldn't be able to run SNES games on a GBA advance at full speed inside any nature of emulator. Now, a converter might be made, though I doubt that'd be likely given how different the snes and gba are (ie, you could write some stub code to fill the voids, but I doubt it in software could ever run in an adequately fast time to allow for real time action), but your mention of the lack of buttons is a pretty good deal breaker as far as the possibility of playing snes games directly.

And finally, you're probably thinking of the GP32 (gamepark 32), which already supports running various emulators includes snes9x. As far as I've heard, though, no gba emulator has been ported to the gp32 yet, but that's more a point of it not happening yet, I think.

Re:Anyone tried to portable-ise a NES yet?

[Quietust]

You mean aside from the Game Axe (mass produced), or Portendo (someone's personal project), or anything else I probably missed?